It’s not that big of a deal really. A guy in the high power rocketry hobby club I’m in has a 20mm cannon. It’s a single shot anti tank rifle basically. It’s pretty much impossible to use it in a crime because of how gigantic and heavy it is.
Such rifles are huge, heavy, expensive, and difficult to transport. I can't find a single instance of a .50 BMG rifle being used to murder someone in the US. Anti-gun groups like Violence Policy Center have one report of a .50 caliber rifle being used in a homicide[1], but Adam Wickizer was a convicted felon and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.[2] That double-disqualifies him from possessing firearms. He most likely used a .50 caliber muzzle-loader black powder rifle, which is far less powerful and does not require a background check to acquire.
If you want to restrict things based on how often they're used in crimes, you probably want to go after handguns. Around half of murders are committed with handguns.[3] Rifles of any kind are used in ~3% of homicides. For comparison, twice as many people are murdered with bare hands than with rifles. And despite civilians owning .50 BMGs for over a century, nobody can find an instance of someone in the US being murdered with one. In short, the data does not support restricting these things.
I don't know if that's supposed to be comforting, but "Don't worry -- this weapon is way too large and powerful for someone to use in mere petty crime!" does not exactly put one at ease
It's trivially easy to make an air gun capable of killing someone with parts from a hardware store and a bicycle tire pump. $20 in parts, give or take, plus the cost of the pump.
Beyond that, manufacturing explosives is also easy with chemicals from a hardware store. Manufacturing stable explosives is a bit trickier, though not by much- it just limits the explosives you can make.
Really big weapons are harder to use in petty crime, because they're really, really obvious when you carry them around, and petty crime isn't worth whipping the big guns out for- the bullet is probably worth more than what you could get off of most people walking the street.
For example .50 BMG rounds are $3-6 per round. Live 20mm rounds require a $200 tax stamp per round and I couldn't even find a place where you could buy live ones.
A potato gun with hair spray as a propellant can for sure kill a man. My friends in high school would make them, and blast a large potato 2-4 football fields.
be careful with these if you get too extravagant. the only thing keeping this from being considered destructive device is that its a smoothbore muzzle loader.
if you were to put a bolt action and or a potato hopper on it or rifle the bore it would be a DD , stay on compresed air if you want to mod up. other than that, smooth bore shove a spud in the end and light up with butane and its a legal device
Hehe, I did professional CAD for a year before college so that whole thing is custom drawn in AutoCAD. As in I hand measured and drew each part because I didn't have some library of parts. It was part of my senior computer science/writing (lol) project 18 years ago. It's sitting in my dad's garage 2,500 miles away. A writeup without some action video would be kind of boring and I don't have the tools or space to build another in my broom closet of an apartment...
You're welcome to build one yourself with the spec and do it. The only things not shown are:
1. An ordinary Schrader (bike tire) on the tank. Drill through the triple walled part somewhere, tap, Teflon tape and twist it in.
2. A 0.25" NPT ~125(?) PSI pop off valve also in the triple walled part (somewhere) and maybe a pressure (I think? The bike pump's gauge should be fine as long as you don't fill it with really cold air and then leave it in the sun). Technically optional, but if you explode yourself it's on you.
2. The battery box to activate the sprinkler valve, but that's just a couple of 9v batteries in series in a project box with a big red button. I never even bothered mounting it to the gun so it just kind of...dangled from the gun by its wires.
3. A wooden block cut to fit between the barrel and tank with a semi-permanent metal strap around it to hold it together. Very solid with this, very janky without it.
Both ends of the sprinkler valve are just sealed with teflon tape and twisted together so You can take it apart for transport.
To assemble the nested barrel I left the 1.5" SDR 21 outside during winter and filled the 2" SCH 80 PVC in the shower with hot water (sat it on the drain plug), then slid the little one into the big one. The 1.5" SDR 21 was hand picked (mic'ed) to closely fit in the outer barrel by the guy I bought it from. You might not even need the outer barrel, but 1.5" SDR is really thin, so the chonky outer barrel protects it.
I played with it up to ~105 PSI, but it could probably handle a lot more without the pop off installed. The U-bend hampers the hell out of the flow, I'm sure, but a 10' long gun would have been very awkward to move around and be hell on the all the component joints. As is, you can hold it like a big minigun and shoot it. Though the cyclic rate is about 1 round per 5 minutes depending on how tired you are on the bike pump. Recoil is negligible. It'll punch a golf ball through 1" of chipboard, who knows what else. Maybe a person.
After the initial discharge the sprinkler valve flap makes a hilarious hooting noise.
Maybe I'll see if the Backyard scientist wants to recreate it? It seems right up his alley.
I did something very similar, but used a butterfly valve rather than a sprinkler release. It meant needing to stand next to it and manually release, but it was a lot cheaper.
I also used 3/4" piping, which worked really well for lots of smaller projectiles, and meant that a female threaded adapter and some epoxy let me use 20oz or 2 liter bottles as tanks. I only got them to 80 psi, but I suspect they would have held just fine at 100.
Soft projectiles would disintegrate in the air (no paintballing) but hard things- gobstoppers, batteries, frozen grapes- could cause a lot of fun destruction.
Everyone thinks james bond when the reality is someone hits you over the head with a rock they found. Like that xkcd where they beat you with a wrench for the password.
The licensing and nerdy nature of owning something like that makes it super safe. Nobody is risking their hobby and investment.
The issue with guns is the end times marketing flooding the zone with guns and the malevolent subcultures. If you want to use an awkward weapon, you can juice up a potato cannon with pvc pipe or something.
The people who can afford to buy and maintain that sort of thing aren't going throw their life away with it in a petty crime. Almost all gun violence is gang related and committed with handguns.
> Almost all gun violence is international warfare.
Unlikely. Less than 100K die in war annually, but that isn't only from gun violence. Most gun-related deaths in the US are not from petty crime or gangs. In 2020, 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. And more have been killed by a gun in the US since 1968 than in all US wars combined.[1] It would be more accurate (yet still inaccurate) to say most gun violence occurs in the US.[2] 67% of gun owners report defense as the reason for gun ownership, yet there is no evidence that guns are protective, and those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed by a gun than otherwise.[3]
A lot of the talking points you're repeating here are intentionally misleading, although I recognize that you may not intend to mislead — you may merely have been misled yourself. If that is the case, you should probably re-evaluate your criteria for judging the credibility of information sources. As you will see, although it seems unlikely to you that almost all gun violence is international warfare, it is in fact true.
I know it can be difficult to read a "wall of text" like this, but accurately conveying the reality of a nuanced situation cannot be done with perky infographics and bullet points, particularly when it is necessary to carefully dissect the half-truths propagated by dishonest parties. I estimate that reading this will take you about four minutes; it's 1632 words. I hope you have the attention span.
As you may not know, most of those 45'222 "gun-related injury" deaths are suicides; as the BBC article you linked explains, only 19'384 were actually gun violence, up from under 15'000 the year before. (The US had 20'982 homicides overall in 2020, but some were not by gun.) Typically suicides by gun are about twice as common as homicides by gun in the US, but apparently 2020 was an exceptionally violent year there.
Unsurprisingly, suicides by gun are enormously more common among people who live in a home with a gun, which accounts for most of the positive correlation between gun death and gun ownership.
Moreover, there is strong evidence that access to a gun increases people's risk of suicide — it's not merely that people blow their heads off because it's easier than hanging yourself or overdosing on drugs, they actually killed themselves when they would have stayed alive if they hadn't had a gun. This effect is, at best, very weak with homicides, to the point that we don't know whether either population gun prevalence or gun ownership is a weak risk factor or a weak protective factor for homicide.
70 million people died in World War II, which is 3500 years' worth of those 19'384 people per year. If we divide those 70 million over the last century, World War II alone accounts for 700'000 deaths per year, seven times the number you cite of 100'000 per year.
5.4 million people died in the Second Congo War (1998–2008), 270 years' worth of those 19'384 people per exceptionally violent year, but to be fair most of them were held at gunpoint in refugee camps where they died of disease or starved to death, rather than being directly shot; only 350'000 were actually direct violent deaths, which is only a bit more than twice as many as were killed in the US during the same period. (But Congo's population is one third as big.) You will note that 5.4 million people killed over 11 years is 490'000 deaths per year, several times the 100'000 wartime deaths per year you cite, and that's just one war of several that were going on at the time, though it was the biggest one.
The US Civil War involved something like 700'000 deaths, which is about 30–40 years of 2020-level US peacetime gun violence, though, again, out of a much smaller population.
You've inaccurately paraphrased Chelsea Bailey's claim in the NBC article (https://archive.fo/TlCkV); she's talking only about the 1.2 million members of the US armed forces killed in US wars, entirely omitting the people who lived in the countries the US was invading. She even omitted the American civilians killed in the US Civil War! The Vietnam War alone, for example, killed at least 1.3 million people, probably closer to 3 million. The 2020 US's 19'384 gun murders per year would take 150 years to reach that number. Bailey counts the Vietnam War as 0.09 million; she didn't even deign to count Vietnamese and Laotian people as the Constitutional three-fifths of a person. Of course, she also included about a million gun suicides in her 1.53 million gun deaths in the US since 1968. For some reason, the source she cited for this number (a number I think is roughly correct, if misleading when presented as an indicator of gun violence) was an MMWR article from 1994 which documents about 700'000 gun deaths, including suicides, since 1968. Evidently her intended audience isn't the kind of person who checks citations.
It should be unsurprising that when one country invades another, the country that gets invaded suffers the bulk of the deaths. On this count, the US is exceptional, both in not having been invaded since 1865 or arguably 1815, and in invading other countries at a truly unprecedented rate, one that is as far as I know unexcelled even by the Soviet Union, the British Empire, and Genghis Khan. This is known to be an important factor in its relatively high peacetime murder rate.
It is indeed very inaccurate to say that most gun violence occurs in the US, even excluding international warfare; countries with higher homicide counts include Mexico, India, Brazil, and Nigeria, and almost all homicides in Mexico, Brazil, and Nigeria are with guns, just like the US. (India has a much lower murder rate than the US, but because its population is five times as large, it has about twice as many murders, though very few are with guns.)
I'm not sure why comparison articles like the BBC article omit Mexico, Brazil, and Nigeria; it's possible that, like Chelsea Bailey at NBC, they don't consider human deaths important if the people who die aren't white, though Bailey went even further by implicitly dehumanizing US civilian and white European victims of warfare as well. Alternatively, instead of attempting to portray the reality of the world accurately, as I am doing here, they are cherry-picking data points in order to justify a preconceived conclusion.
I don't have current worldwide death statistics handy, unfortunately, but the WHO's burden-of-disease report from 2004 says that in 2002, within the category of "intentional injuries", 557'900 people died of "violence" (i.e., murder), 872'662 of "self-inflicted injuries" (suicide), and 171'021 of "war", which is 1.7 times the 100'000 per year figure you cite for wartime deaths. The US had 15'700 homicides that year, according to that report, 2.8% of world homicides. You will note that this means that 97.2% of homicides, and a somewhat lower fraction of gun homicides, were outside the US. So saying that most gun violence occurs in the US is very inaccurate indeed.
Some subset of those 557'900 were killed with guns in peacetime; it would take 125 years of that death rate, even if it were all guns, to equal the 70 million killed in only World War II, out of, again, a much smaller world population. But of course in the 77 years since World War II there have been many other wars, some of which I've mentioned above. 2002 just happened to be a year without much war.
In conclusion, almost all gun violence is international warfare. Statistically the picture is very clear; though the intensity of warfare varies by orders of magnitude from one year to the next, the average number of war deaths is about an order of magnitude higher than the average number of peacetime gun murders. (Also, as you said, most peacetime gun murders are by family members or intimate partners, not robbers or gangs.)
There do remain three possible quibbles.
First, possibly we should count the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Killing Fields, and so on, as "gun violence", and they were not for the most part international warfare. Most of the people killed in the Great Leap Forward were starved to death rather than being shot, and most of the people killed in the Holocaust were gassed, but in both cases gun violence was the foundation of the mass murder system, just as with the Second Congolese Civil War. These deaths (Rummel coined the term "democides" as a generalization of "genocides") account for a surprisingly large fraction of 20th-century violent deaths, comparable in fact to warfare. The US prison system does not rise to the level of these atrocities, as its direct death toll is actually fairly low, but you could argue in the same way that the millions of people every year in the US who are arrested by police with guns and then held in prisons with gun-armed guards are also being subjected to gun violence, even if it doesn't kill them.
Second, possibly World War II was some sort of freak accident that will never be repeated, and the ensuing 60 years of Pax Americana are really more typical of what to expect from now on. Given that Vladimir Putin threatened to start a second nuclear war this week, I am skeptical of that thesis, but it might turn out to be correct. Even in that case, though, peacetime gun homicide has a smaller death toll than warfare; it just stops being an insignificantly small fraction of the total.
Third, as you say, maybe when a missile blows up a hospital and kills half the people inside, or a bomber covers a screaming family with napalm, we shouldn't count that as "gun deaths" because no actual guns are involved, so maybe we should derate the war deaths by some fraction to account for that. We don't really know what fraction of war deaths are from gunshots, especially in cases like Congo with many irregulars and deliberately inaccurate official casualty reports, but even in cases like Vietnam, where there's over a factor of 2 uncertainty in the total death toll. But it seems implausible that gun deaths in war are an order of magnitude less than total deaths in war, so this is not a big enough effect for peacetime gun murders to exceed wartime gun violence.
> A lot of the talking points you're repeating here are intentionally misleading
False. I listed a few facts that are easily verified.
> As you may not know, most of those 45'222 "gun-related injury" deaths are suicides
False. Roughly half are suicides, and not "most." Suicide by gun is a violent death. Your entire diatribe regarding suicide is a straw man.
> 70 million people died in World War II...
I paraphrased, and the title of the article is slightly ambiguous, leaving a tiny pinhole which you are trying to squeeze a straw man of epic proportions through. To be perfectly clear, more Americans have been killed by guns since 1968 than the number of Americans killed in all US wars combined. In this statistic the number of Japanese, North Koreans or Vietnamese, etc., killed are not counted. It is only comparing the number of Americans killed by guns since 1968 to the number of Americans killed in all wars. Yes it is terrible so many have died in war, but unfortunately your argument here is still a straw man and therefore fallicious.
> It is indeed very inaccurate to say that most gun violence occurs in the US,
As stipulated, but I was merely making the point that the statement is more accurate than:
>> Almost all gun violence is international warfare
which is entirely false, and not even 1000 pages of straw man arguments can change that.
In order for your argument to be valid, as mine is, you must focus on what is said, as is, and avoid introducing new information only to attack it.
I understand some people really like guns, but no matter how much they like guns, it doesn't change the simple fact that the more guns there are, the more gun deaths there will be. This is a formula proven over and over, year after year.
It also doesn't change the fact that the Founders had no intention of arming the citizenry, and that our beloved 2nd Amendment is only referring to militias, and we know this beyond doubt from the minutes of the Constitutional Congresses, even though most gun owners can't seem to read the first 3 words of the Amendment. The salient point is not about regulation, it is about militias during a period of history that was so different from today that the 2nd Amendment no longer rationally applies, and people are dying because fanatics, those not exactly mentally stable, insist on owning guns, and not just one or two, but an entire arsenal. One of the statistics in that BBC article is missing something, which is the statistic that for every 100 US citizens there are 120 firearms. But only 1/3rd of Americans are gun owners, so a lot of them have more guns than they can carry or operate, which underscores their fanaticism and irrationality.
No one wants to repeal the 2nd Amendment, not even liberals, because "liberal" literally means tolerant, as in tolerant of those with insane ideas about gun ownership. Though it wouldn't be a bad idea to strike down those portions of DC v. Keller (2008) that overreach beyond the mandate of the Supreme Court to gut the 2nd Amendment, changing it from a selfless right to protect against tyranny to a redundant and selfish right to protect self or property. The Founders debated self-defense and intentionally left it out of the Amendment, because a right of self-defense is much older and more fundamental than the Bill of Rights. And Scalia was completely mistaken: most Americans are not confused about that, nor is there any significant agenda to include self-defense in the 2nd. If that agenda exists, it is of a vanishingly tiny percentage. DC v Heller weakens the 2nd immensely, and is part of a larger trend of dismantling the US Constitution piece by piece, after the suspension of habeas corpus and the continuing assaults on the 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments, and most recently, Article II. I wish the Right would just leave the US Constitution alone and be patriots instead of anarchists.
I am deeply disappointed in the quality of your response.
The issue being disputed is whether, as I said, almost all gun violence is international warfare, or not. I clearly showed that your figure for deaths from international warfare is low by at least an order of magnitude. Your lengthy diatribe about the US is almost entirely irrelevant; whether you are right or wrong about the motivations of 18th-century politicians, your countrymen's eccentric hobbies, or trends in your country's jurisprudence, those have no bearing whatsoever on the death tolls of the Congolese Civil War, Operation Barbarossa, or Nigerian bandit gangs.
The US has very little special relevance to this question, since, as I said, some 95% of deaths and 97% of killings happen elsewhere; there are only a few exceptions:
1. They manufacture a significant fraction of the weapons people everywhere use to kill each other.
2. They have started a significant fraction of the wars in the world over the last century or so by invading other countries.
3. They have unusually transparent and reliable health statistics, from which we can to some extent draw conclusions about the rest of the world.
It is entirely unclear what kind of "straw man" you think I am making of your arguments. You said:
- Less than 100K [people] die in war annually: this is dramatically false, as I showed.
- Some people who die in war don't die from gun violence: I agreed with this, but I don't think the fraction is small enough to change the picture much.
- Most gun-related deaths in the US are not from petty crime or gangs: here you were agreeing with my point that petty crime and gangs are a rounding error.
- Statistics about US "gun-related injuries": I explained why this is misleading (cherry-picked year, cherry-picked country, conflation of suicide with violent deaths) and put it in the wider context.
- "more have been killed by a gun in the US since 1968 than in all US wars combined": presumably this meant more people, not more hamsters, more bottles of wine, or more Americans, since the subject at hand was how many people die, not how many hamsters or Americans die. This is completely false; as I showed, the relationship is the other way around, and it's not even close.
- "It would be more accurate (yet still inaccurate) to say most gun violence occurs in the US": I explained why this statement is actually less accurate.
- "67% of gun owners report defense as the reason for gun ownership, yet there is no evidence that guns are protective, and those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed by a gun than otherwise": this juxtaposition is calculated to produce the false impression that those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed with a gun by someone else than otherwise. In fact, as I explained, in the US, they have a greater chance of killing themselves with a gun, and almost exactly the same chance, on average, of being killed with a gun by someone else. (The direction of the association depends on exactly how you try to control for confounding factors like being poor or living in a dangerous neighborhood.)
So, of your seven "facts that are easily verified", two are correct (and I explicitly affirmed them), three are completely false, and the other two are misleading half-truths.
As for whether suicide by gun is "a violent death", well, yes, there is a sense of the word "violent" in which almost anything you do with a gun is "violent": if you shoot a target, a violent explosion in the gun propels the bullet into a violent impact with the target, at which point usually either the bullet or the target violently shatters.
However, as you are presumably aware, this is not the sense of the word "violent" being used in the phrase "gun violence". When concerned parents complain about "TV violence" they are not complaining about filmed 4th-of-July fireworks shows or after-school specials about suicide; they are complaining about people being depicted as intentionally harming others. Shelters for "domestic violence" victims are not for people whose house was destroyed by a hurricane or who have overdosed on pills at home; they are for people who need to escape from someone else in their home who is intentionally harming them. An old woman, living alone, found in her bathtub after slitting her wrists is not called "domestic violence". Similarly for "sexual violence", "youth violence", "collective violence", "political violence", and so on. So, when we talk about "gun violence", we are talking about people using guns to intentionally harm others, not for target practice, and not for shooting themselves.
This is important because suicide is different from homicide in almost every way that matters: it has different effects, it has different causes, it affects different people, and in general different measures are effective in reducing it. Almost all they have in common from a public-health perspective is that they do not disproportionately affect old people in the way most causes of death do. Conflating them is not helpful for reasoning.
Please, if you reply again, try to write a higher-quality comment next time, and don't insult my intelligence by substituting puns for reasoning in this way. Also, it would be nice to read less irrelevant tangents about your local partisan politics.
tl;dr guards at prison camps had guns, therefore any prisoner who died of disease/malnutrition/gassing was ackshually a gun death. Give me the internet points for the giant rambling wall of pointless text.
It should come as no surprise that this summary is the opposite of what I said: I didn't count those deaths as gun violence, even though arguably I should have, and my conclusion depends on not counting them. If you count them as "gun violence" you will instead come to the conclusion that most deaths from "gun violence" are inflicted in peacetime by governments on their subjects, which is the opposite of my main thesis.
this class of device is considered NFA or AnyOtherWeapon [AOW] if it isnt a sporting rifle or pistol.
greater than 50 cal/12.5 mm is a Destructive Device.
this means a background check similar to a shortbarrel rifle, or fully automatic firearm is required as well as a taxation stamp for purchase and posession.
You can buy _several_ things that are far easier to do intentional crimes with, and cheaper.
The real thing you'd probably have to worry about would be accidents, which assuming a not-complete-moron are probably also much much less likely just because the thing would be expensive and annoying to shoot.
